『The Scent That Revives Emotions and Memories, The Hidden Truth of Love』
🎥 Film Overview
🎬 Title: The Five Devils (Original Title: Les Cinq Diables, 2022)
🌍 Country: 🇫🇷 France
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Queer / Psychological
🗓️ Produced and Aired: 2022, Pathé Films
⏳ Runtime: 96 minutes
📢 Director: Léa Mysius
🖋️ Screenplay: Léa Mysius (Co-screenplay: Paul Guilhaume)
👩💼 Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos – Joanne
Sally Dramé – Vicky
Swala Emati – Julia
🧩 In-Depth Story Exploration (Spoilers Included)
🌿 The Sense of Smell and the Medium of Time Travel
The film's most unique setup is the protagonist Vicky's ability.
- Superhuman Sense of Smell: Vicky has the ability to smell objects or people and accurately replicate that scent. She collects these scents in glass bottles like perfumes.
- Medium for Time Travel: When Vicky smells these scents, she seems to travel back in time, like in a dream, to observe specific individuals' memories or past events. This ability goes beyond just seeing the past, as it allows her to interact with figures from the past (or at least for them to be aware of her existence), giving the film an exciting time travel element.
This setup is reminiscent of German author Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, but in this film, the sense of smell is used as an emotional pathway directly connecting to the characters' feelings and suppressed truths.
💙 Forbidden Love and Youthful Passion
Vicky's time travel through her sense of smell takes the audience back to the past when Joanne and Julia were teenagers, showing just how intense and passionate their relationship was.
- Fateful Attraction: Joanne was a bright and active gymnast, while Julia was the rebellious and mysterious younger sister of Jimmy. Their relationship was filled with the pure passion of youth and the thrill of forbidden love.
- Shared Identity: In their conservative small town, the only ones who could truly understand and share their sexual identities were each other. Their love was exclusive, focused only on each other, with explosive passion. In the film, the scene where Joanne calls Julia "My Sun" (Mon Soleil) highlights just how absolute Joanne's love was for Julia.
🔥 Destruction and Separation: Social Pressure and the Interference of Trauma
Their relationship is brutally destroyed by external pressure and a tragic event.
- The Trauma of the "Fire Incident": The romantic relationship between the two ends with the mysterious fire incident that devastates the town. Julia’s connection (or the false accusation) to the fire leads to her isolation and eventual imprisonment.
- Social Conformity and Repression: After Julia disappears, Joanne, under the pressure of her town’s people, her father, and perhaps even guilt over the fire incident, seals her true desires and chooses a “normal” life with a heterosexual marriage to Jimmy. Joanne’s mundane unhappiness and obsessive swimming in the cold lake symbolize her desperate attempt to escape from her repressed self.
- Unfinished State: The relationship between Joanne and Julia does not have a beautiful ending. It leaves Joanne with trauma in the form of injustice, betrayal, and unfulfilled love, weighing her down in the present.
🧑🤝🧑 Reunion and Energy: The Past’s Waves Shaking the Present
Years later, when Julia returns to the town, their relationship causes intense ripples in the current family dynamic of Joanne.
- Joanne's Hostility and Guardedness: Joanne adopts an extremely guarded and hostile attitude towards Julia. This is not out of hatred, but because Julia’s presence awakens the past and desires that Joanne has desperately repressed. Julia represents the mirror image of the "true Joanne" that Joanne wants to avoid.
💡 Vicky’s Fate and the Weight of Choices
What makes this film transcend a simple melodrama or fantasy is the moment when Vicky begins to question her very existence.
- Judging Her Own Existence: Vicky travels back in time and learns about her parents' relationship, facing the harsh truth that she might be the result of her mother sacrificing her true love (Julia) and compromising.
- The Danger of Intervening in the Past: After witnessing the tragic past of Joanne and Julia, Vicky unconsciously tries to intervene and change their fate. This leads to the existential fear of "If my mom had made a different choice, I wouldn’t have been born", creating a conflict between her desire for her mother’s happiness and her own survival instincts.
🗝️ Liberation and Salvation
The relationship between Joanne and Julia goes beyond a mere queer romance tragedy, showing the cost of suppressing one's true self for the soul.
- The Need for Emotional Liberation: Vicky’s time travel forces Joanne to confront her repressed feelings (her love for Julia, guilt over the fire). As the truth from the past is revealed, Joanne finally finds a way out of her unhappy present.
- Julia's Role: Julia symbolizes the flame of the past and the possibility of liberation for Joanne. While the film’s ending is not entirely clear, it hints that Joanne will either choose Julia or at least acknowledge her true desires, finding a new beginning outside her compromised life.
The relationship between Joanne and Julia was intense and destructive, but ultimately leaves a message that only truth can break an old curse that burdens a family’s soul. Their love was the only hope to break the cycle of the 'Five Devils,' as the film’s title suggests.
The Five Devils is as complex and mysterious as its ambition, a captivating and intense film that explores the question "Do love and regret transcend time and space?" through the sensory pathway of smell. While it may not have a perfectly smooth narrative, the way it unleashes sealed emotions and hidden desires leaves a profound impact.
🎯 Personal Rating
💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★★★
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